The significant problems we face cannot be solved at
the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

-- Albert Einstein

The Five Havens Web pages are dedicated to the vision
of creating a respectful culture -- a society devoted to fostering and
protecting the well being of all people and of the natural world.

Since ancient times, people have worked to improve the
various conditions of life: their relationships with each other, their
tools, their understanding of the natural world, and the practices of the
society itself. Unfortunately, many of these changes, based on partial
knowledge, have caused far more problems than they solved. Todays most
serious difficulties are the side effects of yesterday's improvements.

Compounding the misfortune, these flawed innovations are
widely adopted before their harmful side effects are discovered, and once
they have become standard practice it seems impossible to get rid of them.
The side effects require solutions, which in turn have further, poorly
understood but generally unfortunate, side effects of their own. All in
all, the accumulated failure of wisdom is quite astonishing.

Currently, major aspects of the dominant culture of our
"developed countries" are based on assumptions and practices which ensure
that they will fail to support the well being of many of their own citizens,
and relegate people living in "developing" areas to marginal ways of living,
if even that. Specifically, our traditions, policies, standards and habitual
practices entice or coerce vast numbers of people into devoting their time,
effort and resources toward striving for goals that cannot possibly be
attained -- effort which leads to widespread feelings of failure, dispair
and alienation, along with more and more increases in human population,
greater and greater degradation of environments, and a host of other unfortunate
consequences.

We believe that these problems are based on ignorance
-- ignorance of the fundamental nature of human life and ignorance of the
natural world. It isn't facts that we lack -- we have more than enough
information -- what is missing is understanding. Accordingly, our goal
is to seek out the roots of these failures of our current ways of doing
things, to discover or develop alternatives based on deeper understanding,
and to set them out for public examination and further exploration.

The vision of a world emerging from this sea of self-made
disasters is more than just wishful thinking. From aboriginal cultures,
from Western science, from contemplative and spiritual traditions all over
the World, people are finding the deeper understanding, the wisdom we need
to correct these difficulties. Believe it or not, looking over the ideas
and resources we've already found, the whole situation seems actually quite
promising. Please feel welcome to join in this difficult, vital, powerful
and delightful work.

Considering each of these wonderful examples of applied
intelligence, one has to wonder how it was possible -- what was the secret
key to their success? At first, each one appears to be a unique, isolated
miracle, with no relevance to other problems. As we look into how
these methods do what they do, though, parallels and similarities emerge.
Indeed, the more we study these amazing results, the more they seem to
be based on the same principles:

Five Havens is like a tree. Haven
Home is at the center, focusing on whatever one views as central in
the situation: oneself, one's family, one's own neighborhood, and so on.
The emphasis of Haven Home is individual integrity and leadership. Haven
Home represents the basic goodness of human beings, and the goal of establishing
basic sanity and compassion as the foundation of all social action.

From Haven Home grow four great
branches, extending the basic principles, standards and practices into
economic, educational, health, and environmental relationships: